Modern telecommunications networks provide ever more complex services to end-users (one recent example being mobile video telephony). Correspondingly, the processes involved in provisioning such user services are also rapidly growing in complexity, and often involve complicated setup and configuration processes involving a wide range of networking technologies. From a technical perspective, user services thus represent complex sets of service characteristics, including software and hardware configuration settings and procedures.
Service providers attempt to hide this technical complexity from end-users to some extent, usually by representing specific defined combinations of service characteristics as distinct service offerings. Such service offerings are typically referred to in the art as ‘telecommunications products’. Accordingly, the term ‘product’ will be used herein to refer to a defined combination of service features and characteristics which together specify a service available to users of a telecommunications system.
Though these ‘products’ do not correspond to products in a conventional sense, they can serve as useful abstractions of the underlying telecommunications functionality and its technical complexity, and can simplify the technical processes involved in provisioning services. However, to achieve this, effective telecommunications product management tools and methodologies are needed.
Existing product management systems for telecommunications services tend to rely on workflow-based approaches, where the product definition is embedded in the service provisioning process, and domain managers (DMs) are invoked directly from various points in the workflow. Though this can work reasonably well where the product-to-technology relationship is close and simple, it does mean that the characteristics of a product are hard to see and hard to maintain. This can result in many thousands of often closely related products being managed, each with attendant launch and maintenance costs, as well as confusion for the end-user and constraints on the ability of the service provider to implement rationalizations. It also often directly ties products to implementing technologies, further adding to the proliferation of very similar products that differ only in being supported by different technologies. Adding new technologies can be a complex, risky and expensive process in these circumstances.
As an example of the increase in complexity of services, telecommunications service providers are beginning to shift their focus from simple connectivity to products that add higher-level functionality to the connection, for example by delivering media content using IT platforms and hosted applications. The connectivity products themselves are also in flux, shifting from voice and data services based on conventional telephone networks to high-speed, high-bandwidth wired and wireless/mobile telephony and data services. New complex telecommunications products combining multiple telecommunications services are being devised. The need to manage migration from legacy to next-generation technologies also adds complexity to the maintenance and management of telecommunications products
The present invention seeks to alleviate some of these problems.